Will 90-90-90 empower people to reject decades of stigmatizing and dangerous misinformation?

If WHO’s AIDS experts and bureaucrats had set out to generate stigma against Africans with HIV and to ensure tens of millions of new infections in low risk adults, they couldn’t have done much better than what have been doing for decades – focusing HIV prevention messages almost exclusively on sex.

This focus has – distressingly – been accepted and implemented by NGOs, churches, African governments, and others who should know better. They should know better because they see HIV-positive children with HIV-negative mothers, and couples where one or both are infected despite never having had a non-marital sexual partner.

Can we expect any benefit from messages that continue to focus on sexual risks? During the last several decades, a number of studies provided special warnings about sexual risks to selected people and then looked to see if they were less likely to get HIV. Significantly, there was no impact (see table 3 in this link)[1]. In other words: people already know sex is a risk for HIV – banging again and again on that point does not help.

Why health professionals give Africans incomplete, stigmatizing, and dangerous misinformation about HIV/AIDS risks? Reasons include: ignorance, fear the African public will avoid health care, fear of losing one’s job, and no doubt others. What is clear is that health professionals – including notably experts in international agencies and foreign aid programs – have a conflict of interest in telling Africans risks in healthcare.